Pointing fingers in Pinotgate

The French firm Sieur D’Arques was convicted for supplying fake Pinot.

Let’s talk about the Pinot that wasn’t.

This week finally brings some resolution to Pinotgate 2010, resolved for the moment with the fraud convictions of 12 people in a French court for selling to E&J Gallo wine labeled as Pinot Noir that was nothing of the sort. The defendants, vintners and co-ops in southern France, have said they may appeal, according to the AP.

The case alleged that what Gallo received as Pinot Noir for its Red Bicyclette label from Sieur d’Arques, a large wine merchant in the Languedoc region, was in fact Merlot and Syrah. Gallo has said it is “deeply disappointed” in its supplier, and reiterated that only 20 percent of the total wine involved was ever imported, all for the 2006 vintage. (Wine Spectator has a great explanation of the whole boondoggle.)

It’s only February, but this whole mess is the wine world’s current frontrunner for Schadenfreude of the Year. Not only does it involve an American wine giant getting duped by the French (the freedom-fry cooks are currently heating their oil again) but it goes to the heart of what Pinot partisans have been bemoaning for years: Our precious grape has been ruined by the masses.

Pinot has always been a persnickety soul. One of many “Sideways” ironies is that the crowning moment of the very movie that sparked Pinot’s mainstream turn was, in fact, a rhapsody on how difficult a grape it is. When Pinotphiles (who even among wine snobs have a slightly higher snob factor) carp about the arrival of the $8 Pinot, it’s partly because we hate our beloved grape being shared with the masses. Cheapen Cabernet if you like — some of the most renowned Cabernet-based wines are still made in tens of thousands of cases — but Pinot’s historic context in Burgundy only allowed it to succeed on a miniscule scale. Cab was extensible; Pinot wasn’t.

This conviction, then, was an affirmation of every Pinotphile’s conspiracy theory: that our beloved Pinot had been defiled by lesser grapes and the forces of large-scale industrial winemaking.

And it has been. It is a well-known reality that the road to cheap Pinot is paved with more robust grapes; many inexpensive Pinot Noirs on the shelf are anything but 100 percent pure, with Merlot, Syrah, Petite Sirah and even Chardonnay blended in. The most scrupulous wine companies simply admit what’s in the bottle. Whatever the composition, it’s a safe bet that industrial-scale Pinot often requires the sort of winemaking hijinks — sugar additions (for the Europeans), reverse osmosis, maybe a dose of gum arabic or Mega Purple — that are the modern tools of the corporate winemaker. (It reputedly happens for more expensive Pinot, too, but that’s a different story.) The net result is a bottle that’s drinkable and mainstream, if not distinguished in any way as Pinot Noir.

Curiously, a lot of bile has been directed toward Gallo: How could they not know this wasn’t Pinot? Didn’t anyone taste it? It’s a fair question; a Gallo spokesperson replied that “there is no way to chemically test wine to establish its varietal composition with certainty.” And it’s entirely possible that no one tasted the wine in more than a cursory way before purchasing it.

At worst this might have been a vinous case of don’t-ask-don’t-tell. Bulk Pinot Noir mostly tastes red and wet, and beyond that it can be mistaken for any other mass-grown red wine. This is true not only for the Languedoc but virtually anywhere that industrial Pinot plantings have appeared. Perhaps the best compliment I’ve ever had for cheap Pinot is that it tastes like Pinot, sort of. So I don’t doubt someone at Gallo might have tasted the faux-Pinot and found no Pinot character. They might also have tasted real Pinot and found no Pinot character.

Now there’s word that Constellation Brands, the world’s largest wine company, also bought fake Pinot from the same source. They, too, insist they thought it was the real thing.

But the real story of modern Pinot can be found on any supermarket wine shelf. Look at the fine print on bottles of $8 or $12 Pinot, and you’ll see a self-contained tale of globalization. The brands may scream California — Beringer, Meridian, Pepperwood Grove, Redwood Creek — but the labels tell a different story: Vin de Pays de l’Herault (France), Provincia di Pavia (Italy), Valle Central (Chile), Rheinhessen (central Germany).

The metastory to the huge jump in Pinot production from last year’s harvest, mostly from warm inland areas, is that those vineyards came online just in time to balance out the flood of European bulk Pinot that has been slaking our thirst for the past half-decade. Ironically, the fake Pinot that hobbled Gallo was for its Red Bicyclette label, which always was branded as a French wine. More typically, all this accent-wielding Pinot has been going to brands that speak fluent American.

So who gets the blame? We all do. The wine industry didn’t just wake up one day and decide to make one of the most notoriously difficult grapes into a mass product. It responded to a huge demand for a cheap version of a wine that probably shouldn’t be cheap. You could argue that big wineries have been misleading novice drinkers into a false view of what Pinot should be. But an alternate argument — and one I’m sticking with — is that until we accept that some wines just can’t be made on the cheap, we’re being sold the wine we deserve. If we’re so worried about Merlot being quietly blended into cheap Pinot, there’s an easy solution: Stop drinking cheap Pinot.